Tech Lead - Data Platform

Kobalt Intro:

​Kobalt is one of the world’s largest, most innovative music companies, using technology to power creative freedom, transparency, ownership and control for artists, songwriters, publishers, and labels. 

Founded in 2000 by Swedish entrepreneur Willard Ahdritz, the startup built a platform to maximize efficiency, accuracy, and transparency across the billions of micro-payments collected in today’s highly complex digital world. As the traditional music companies fought technology and contracted, Kobalt embraced it and grew, building an infrastructure and world-class creative team purposely designed to usher in the streaming era, along with a more fair, rewarding music business for creators. Our technology enables them to access royalty payments 4x faster while also maximising the royalty collection amounts.

With over 400 employees in 12 offices around the world, Kobalt today represents over 31,000 artists and songwriters, 700,000 songs and 600 publishing companies. Kobalt is proud to work with artists, songwriters, and companies like Childish Gambino, Max Martin, Paul McCartney and MPL Communications, Disney Music Group, and many more. 

Context: 

​​Kobalt continues to grow 3x faster than the market and as such has a continuous focus on scaling out its systems, products and services to cope with the increasing demand. One of the key opportunities for Kobalt is to address the masses of songwriters that are reasonably early in their careers and as such struggle to get representation from strong publishers. As most publishers depend on primarily manual processes, the cost of service usually outweighs the revenue potential that those songwriters would generate. Through technology, Kobalt aims to reduce the cost of service for each individual songwriter, making it viable to support large numbers of songwriters at a marginal cost.

Who are the Data Platform & Analytics Team?

The Data Platform and Analytics team manages Kobalt Music’s data platform infrastructure as well as core ML driven services. These include scalable entity resolution systems used to match our catalogue against billions of lines of listener consumption data, whilst supporting multiple business units with data products and self-serve tooling.

To improve our data products, we have started to work on a new self-serving data mesh with the aim of empowering data analysts with data discovery and quality control.

Ultimately DPA offers a diverse range of opportunities to make a positive tangible benefit to the business and our clients.

Team Tech Stack:

• Spark, DBT, Jupyter Notebook
• AWS: Athena, Glue, Step Functions, Lambda, RDS, S3, DMS, EMR, SageMaker, ...
• Terraform, CircleCI, Kubernetes, Docker
• Python, Java

Recent Projects:

• Engaging with stakeholder to ideate and building out Kobalt’s Data Platform and Data Mesh
• Large scale entity resolution service, attributing user consumption to our catalogue to maximise claims
• Forecasting to estimate royalties across our catalogue 
• Detecting and tracking the performance of up and coming singer/songwriters 

What you will bring:

We are looking for a Tech Lead Data Platform Engineer to implement our Data Platform Strategy. This is an exciting opportunity to work in the heart of music publishing, empowering innovation, enhancing business efficiency and catalysing revenue generation opportunities through the strategic use of data, AI, scalable tooling and self-service analytics

Must haves:

• Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation,  ...)
• Experience maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• Expertise writing Automated Tests
• Expertise monitoring, automated alerting of services
• Experience writing and optimising ETL pipelines
• Cloud computing experience, especially around ETL, orchestration and permissions 
• Expertise in at least one OOP language out of Python, Java, Scala
• Experience writing SQL

Nice to haves:

• Docker, Kubernetes
• Jupyter, DBT
• AWS
• Kafka
• BI tools such as Tableau/Quicksight
• Experience with python web scraping tools
• An interest or experience in Data Science and Machine Learning

What does success look like:

• You will lead the strategy & development of Kobalt Music’s Data Platform
• Liaises with key stakeholders across the business to align requirements and priorities
• Applies newly acquired knowledge and skills to enhance their work and contribute to the team’s objectives.
• Proposes new ideas or improvements to processes that benefit the team or company.
• Demonstrates a commitment to continuous learning by staying updated with the latest industry trends and technologies

What do we offer:

• Salary Range: Discuss with the Talent Partner. 
• Flexible working. KTech operates with a hybrid working policy (fully remote possible). 
• 25 days annually. 
• 1 wellbeing day per quarter.  
• Half day summer Fridays (July and August). 
• Christmas closure.
• Meeting free Fridays afternoon outside of the summer months. We use this as dedicated learning time. 
• 5% pension contribution. 
• Health Insurance. 

Interview Process and our commitments to you:

• We are committed to completing the process in 3 working weeks and are willing to be flexible to meet the candidates requirements. 

• We are also committed to providing feedback on each interview no longer than 48hrs after the interview via email, telephone call or ZOOM.